ABSTRACT
Translation is a site of tension and conflict, an activity swept along, in the dark and without a reliable compass, on the currents of culture, ideology and history. Antoine Berman has the following to say about the linguistic discourse on translation studies: linguistics continues to insist that translation is a proper object of linguistic study, and provides a conceptual analytical framework for that study, not to mention its cultural and historical dimensions. Earlier linguistic theories of translation fell mainly within the domain of contrastive linguistics, which is not the same as translation linguistics but still an important element of translation studies. The linguistic discourse is just one of those theories and cannot completely circumscribe translation. But the comparisons need to be, and have been, extended beyond the confines of differential semantics and grammar into the broader areas of text structure and functioning, into the sociocultural functioning of translation.
